Alec Baldwin: Monster or Alienated Parent?

You shouldn't swear at an 11-year-old, no matter what, but stories I've done on divorce help me understand why a parent could react with that kind of frustration. Fathers often get a bad deal in the courts, often exacerbated by credulous reporting of bad studies by liberal reporters.

Watch "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" on a special edition of "20/20" Friday, May 4, at 10 p.m. EDT

Here's how I covered it in my book "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel -- Why Everything You Know Is Wrong" Click here to buy the book.

MYTH: Divorce hurts women much more than men, and many men abandon their kids.

TRUTH: Both men and women suffer after divorce, and lots of men
want to give more to their kids.

The media (including the men, for psychological reasons involving guilt
or other factors best left to Dr. Phil), see men as inviting, politically correct
targets. When experts start trumpeting statistics that add up to "men are
bad," reporters listen.

For years, I heard bad things about deadbeat dads. They were living it up,
while their ex-wives and children had to scrape by. It's a recurring story, and
the media regurgitates it regularly. It's also group slander.

In 1985, Lenore Weitzman, then a sociologist at Harvard, published data
showing that men prosper after divorce, while women and children suffer terribly.
Weitzman's report was appalling: Men's standard of living rose 42 percent
after divorce, while women's declined by 73 percent. The media couldn't
get enough of this exciting news. Those figures were cited not only in news
stories, but in 348 social science articles, 250 law review articles, and 24 appeals
court cases.

Around that time, government officials also reported that Census data
showed that about half of the divorced fathers in America didn't pay child
support they owed.

The evening newscasts and the papers featured both claims uncritically.

The stories fit comfortably into the media's "save the victim" rut. But get the
shovel: The stories didn't deserve the airtime or the headlines. A little reportorial
digging would have burst the sanctimonious bubble.

Digging was finally done, but not by the media. Arizona State University
psychologist Sanford Braver set out initially to examine the reasons for the
shocking data. Why were those divorced fathers acting so irresponsibly? How
could a dad abandon his child?

Braver was surprised to discover that the Weitzman figures were wrong,
the result of a mathematical error. Weitzman later admitted she was wrong.
She said a computer analyst had made a mistake -- a mistake, in this case,
heard around the world.